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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 25/06/2026

Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak financed their first product launch by selling "Blue Boxes" (devices that let you make free long distance calls by cheating the phone company) door to door in the UC Berkeley dorms: macdailynews.com/2024/06/19/s... 27/

macdailynews.com

Steve Jobs felt certain Apple would never have existed without Woz and him making blue boxes

Steve Jobs said building illegal blue boxes to allow users to make long distance and international phone calls for free with Steve Wozniak…

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 25/06/2026

Now, I'm not going to weep for lost revenues that Jobs and Woz denied to AT&T. After all, AT&T was stealing that money from its customers, which is why, just a few years later, a federal court convicted AT&T of monopolistic practices and broke the company up: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup... 28/

en.wikipedia.org

Breakup of the Bell System - Wikipedia

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 25/06/2026

But the *legal term* for what a Blue Box does is "toll theft," which is to say, Apple - a company *literally founded on theft* - now makes the majority of its profits by convincing people that making a competing product is *literally* stealing. 29/

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